[Coco] ncurses Library for C

[Manny]

Willard Goosey wrote:
>> Having my interest spurred by the discussion of a public domain text 
>> editor, I was wondering if an updated ncurses (or curses) package could 
>> be created for things like unbuffered input, moving the cursor to a 
>> particular position, and the like. 
> 
> It could be done.... 
> 
> I think the main reason it hasn't is that curses, under OS-9, would
> mainly be a compatiblity library.  CGFX has just about everything
> curses offers.

I'll take a look at CGFX to see what it has to offer. I don't really 
plan on using a graphics window. I hope to only have to use a text 
window that allows the user 40 or 80 columns. Does CGFX have the ability 
to detect the size of the window? I'll probably take a look sometime 
soon. Probably next week at the earliest. (Three 2am - 12pm shifts have 
an amazing ability to stop one's brain from doing much else than sulk 
and want sleep. :) )

> That said, there does seem to be a little interest in having proper
> curses for OS-9.  There's some source on rtsi that nobody's been able
> to successfully compile...  

I've downloaded this and aim to play with it sometime in the future. Or 
at least after a few other things get done in my ever expanding todo list.

> Actually, just recently I was complaining to a friend of mine about
> this, and he hacked up a curses front-end he'd written into something
> that pretends to be real curses (he even got rogue to compile with it)
> but the code's so dreadful I doubt the CoCo's C compiler could handle
> it, at least right now.

I find Microware's C compiler to like dreadful code, so that's okay. :) 
(Yeah, I know it's loosely based on K&R 1.)

-M.

> For your text editor project, the main reason you might want curses is
> so you could then compile your editor under another OS.  If you don't
> care about compatibility, you could just use cgfx.
> 
> Willard